Escondido lawyer pens book on NFL officials

As it happens, that Super Bowl-winning pass was thrown by Ben Roethlisberger, a near-impossible play that screamed “Replay!”

Then with the Pittsburgh Steelers, wide receiver Santonio Holmes somehow got behind three Arizona Cardinals and went all Baryshnikov in the right back corner of the end zone. Leaping high for the catch, with most of his body out of bounds, Holmes touched down with the toes of both cleats just inside the sideline.

Seemingly a half-instant after Holmes landed, another man sprinted into the picture from out of nowhere, stood over the receiver and shot both hands in the air. With vigor. Without hesitation.

“Greg Gautreaux,” said Escondido attorney Richard Lister, identifying the field judge who signaled the touchdown that indeed was confirmed by replays of every angle. “Such a great call.”

Even with a billion or so people watching, you won’t hear a lot of them saying “good call” on any decision made by an official in Super Bowl XLV, but you’ll likely hear the zebras second-guessed or cursed in any number of languages on any number of plays Sunday.

Lister, on the other hand, will be one of the few folks on the planet who’ll look at the referee and his Super Bowl crew as anything but egregious mistakes waiting to happen. Befitting a man whose law practice focuses on mediation, Lister has authored “The Third Team,” a book that provides an insightful and respectful look at the world of NFL officials.

“They want to excel, want to make the hard call, really want the challenge of the tough play,” said Lister. “There’s a real orthodoxy to making that call, like the Holmes catch. It happens so quickly. Nobody knows the name ‘Greg Gautreaux,’ but if something goes wrong, the names of those who’ve erred become pretty public pretty quickly.”

If something goes wrong in the Super Bowl, too, the official will never hear the end of it. Just last August, referee Bill Leavy admitted to the Seattle Seahawks that he’d been haunted for four-plus years by his performance in Super Bowl XL, another one won by Roethlisberger and the Steelers.

“It left me with a lot of sleepless nights, and I think about it constantly,” said Leavy, confirming that he “kicked two calls” that he wouldn’t specify. “I’ll go to my grave wishing that I’d been better. I know that I did my best at that time, but it wasn’t good enough.

“When we make mistakes, you got to step up and own them. It’s something that all officials have to deal with, but unfortunately when you have to deal with it in the Super Bowl, it’s difficult.”

The job, without doubt, is difficult enough. Some of the coaches who deride officials the hardest have said they wouldn’t want the gig for twice the money.

You don’t even get to officiate in a Super Bowl until you’ve basically proved and re-proved your skills, time and again, over the 17 weeks of the regular season and then some. Then again, while the best teams sometimes don’t get to the Super Bowl, the best officiating team never gets there. Not at the same time, anyway.

In effect, the Super Bowl is also like the Pro Bowl for officials, selected for the individual excellence at their own positions after a regular season in which they did their jobs as part of a unit that works together throughout the year. The crew that works the conference championship games and Super Bowl are, in fact, All-Star teams.

“There are baseball umpires in the Hall of Fame, but no referees in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and there’ve been some great officials in the NFL,” said Lister. “So the pinnacle for them is to be selected to work a Super Bowl.”

Not until late in Super Bowl Week is the officiating crew revealed. The referee Sunday will be Walt Anderson, who has worked 13 postseason games to this point.

Considering the events of the 2010 regular season, the officiating crew may be under even more scrutiny for this Super Bowl. A recurring theme was the NFL’s crackdown on helmet-to-helmet hits and vicious tackles on “helpless” targets. The player drawing the most notoriety and paying the highest fines, Pittsburgh linebacker James Harrison, has been taunting the league office with some of his comments since he got to Dallas.

As if the Super Bowl ref doesn’t already have enough to worry about. Not everything has to do with penalties and the usual orders of business.

The referee also has to be highly mindful of breaks in the action, and in the Super Bowl, that means millions. Advertisers fork over megadollars for commercials placed not just during the Super Bowl, but during key times of the game for maximum impact.

Bob McElwee was the man on the spot in Super Bowl XXVII, a contest between the Dallas Cowboys and Buffalo Bills that was tied 13-13 in the third quarter. McElwee had the judgment to manage six breaks in play during the period, but after an early timeout, the Cowboys went on a yardage- and clock-eating drive that afforded McElwee no natural point for an officials’ timeout.

“You’ve got General Motors and General Foods paying huge amounts of money, but this is an important game, and you can’t stop the action just to stop it,” said Lister. “(McElwee) said he didn’t know what he was going to do. It turned out that Dallas had 12 guys in the huddle, Troy Aikman counted heads and gave the signal for the timeout. McElwee said ‘I was the happiest guy in the Western Hemisphere.’ ”